art in vienna and other stories

Teresa Vittucci : all eyes on her

In these hard times of my life in which I have to start dealing with social networks and all the media I have for long time avoided, I get a (great) slap in my face out of this art performance that, again, something don’t-know-what told me to attend. We are back in Vienna, in WUK, acronym for Werkstätten- und Kulturhaus, the House of Workshops and Culture, a beautiful formerly industrial building offering space for concerts, exhibitions, education, rehearsals, intercultural connections. The event I am joining is “All eyes on” from Teresa Vittucci, organised by WUK performing arts, the space dedicated to everything that is in between –or involving all together– dance, theatre and performance. “All eyes on” is about the double nature of the human being, who can be either exhibitionist or voyeur. This duality, together with the definition of private and public, gets emphasised online, where now we do most of the actions we were normally carrying out in the real world: buying clothes, getting new friends, finding a job – and sex. Sex can be easily found on many different platforms, where anyone can watch and make a choice. And Teresa chooses one of this channels to bring her performance to a third level of perception of what is public and what is private: the stage.

The audience starts to enter when she is already there, kneeling in the centre of a fully lighted mirrored platform, wearing a very red pullover on a very transparent bodysuit. She may not look like the typical girl someone would search online just for sexy fun; but the online chat she is connected with seems to appreciate. On the right of the stage, a screen shows what the chat users see through the webcam Teresa is connected to, while on the left a second screen shows the messages she receives.
She is acting like a sort of doll, somewhere in between a state of trance…and dumbness. I really don’t know what to expect. Then, she starts to sing. “Never thought I’ve found someone like youuu”. Neither did I. The song keeps going on, some people laugh. I genuinely wonder why. Then another song, this time something more amusing, although in the meanwhile she has opened the bodysuit from the bottom and started to show her hairy vagina. And many other situations follow: she is interacting with the audience, even sharing a lasagna with us; she is playing with the chat users, talking to them, asking them how do they like her, what do they like about her. The guys are nice. They enjoy the atypical and almost violent performance in its artistic sexiness, they even ask about the audience. They don’t seem astonished by what they see; rather curious and impressed. In this double role of performer for the chat and the live audience, Teresa becomes the exhibitionist, having us in the role of voyeurs.

…And everything starts to change, in my stomach, in my brain. The undefined sensation I felt before gets a shape, becomes now a clear vision: and this is not strictly coming out of the performance in this features; rather what I get now so strong and powerful out of it. And I think about these lonely people, who are apparently looking more for company or entertainment than sex; about the human fragility hidden behind a screen; about her strength in being so exposed; about the slight embarrassement in the audience mixed with laughters and –maybe- considerations. This hits me like…little tears in my eyes.

“There is something special happening here, now, between us. We all know it, we all feel it. Although we cannot describe it. And if we could, the explanation would probably ruin it”.

Head image: extract from the performance, pic from WUK

P.s. (which is actually a preface): I should explain that before any performance or art event I don’t like to read carefully what it will be about; and the reason is that I don’t want to be influenced nor to have already a view or opinion. But then, after it, I put together the pieces of what I caught and what was the real intention of the author.